“Shrimp Boy’s Day in Court”
“there Shrimp Boy was, a middle-aged former Chinese-mafia don, now a free man, living at his girlfriend’s condo in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, trying to become what he called ‘‘normal’’ — a state he found exotic and thrilling. Normal, to Shrimp Boy, included mild environmentalism, like conserving gas (‘‘Nobody in prison thinks about the next generation!’’); scooping up after his girlfriend’s dogs, a terrier named Happy and a mastiff named Valentine; and hosting dinner parties…
Shrimp Boy and his lead lawyer, J. Tony Serra, are both characters from a bygone San Francisco. Shrimp Boy describes Serra, who is 80, as ‘‘an old, very old wizard.’’ Earlier in his career, in 1979, Serra successfully defended the Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton against the charge of murdering a prostitute. He has also represented members of the Hells Angels, Earth First! and the Symbionese Liberation Army, the revolutionary group that kidnapped Patty Hearst…
The tongs were started by Chinese immigrants who came to California in the mid-1800s, for the Gold Rush and to work on the railroad. The immigrants experienced terrible discrimination. In 1856, the Californian Committee on Mines and Mining Interests declared the Chinese ‘‘a disgusting scab upon the fair face of society — a putrefying sore upon the body politic.’’ The Chinese looked to their own community for help. ‘‘No matter what you need, you go to the tong,” says Ko-lin Chin, a professor at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, describing 1800s San Francisco. ‘‘If a Chinese man dies and he doesn’t want to be buried in the United States, the tongs help ship the body back to China. If you need a notice read in English. If you need a loan.’’ The tongs also provided extralegal amenities, like prostitution, opium and gambling dens. To this day, tongs serve a range of roles, and they have spread to Chinatowns nationwide. Some tongs focus on extortion, others on scholarship funds. ‘‘It depends on the leadership,’’ says Chin, who notes that many tongs have a street gang, if not a connection to organized crime…
in 1985, Shrimp Boy took a bus to San Francisco. At a Vietnamese noodle shop, he tried to motivate himself to buy the Chinese newspaper and look for a real job. But then he noticed some girls outside. Pretty classy for hookers, Shrimp Boy thought. Within an hour, he was talking with them about how much money they made through their pimps and whether they would rather work for him. He rented a big Victorian house, and within a matter of months, Shrimp Boy says, his escort business was producing more cash than he could handle. He started rolling profits into a variety of enterprises: cocaine distribution, fencing stolen weapons, Rolexes, jewelry and pills. Shrimp Boy talks about that stage of his life as normal people often talk about college: Crazy time! Learned a lot! Needed to grow up and move on.”
This was such a great article to fall into, to encounter people and history.
